Query and update data on MongoDB using PowerShell

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I’m working on client side at the moment where we use MongoDB as data storage. We reached the point where we need to read some data from MongoDB with PowerShell. I thought this might be interesting to some people. Therefore I decided to share my experience about this.

What do we need to connect to MongoDB with PowerShell

The only thing we need is a MongoDB driver. I used the official C# driver which is supported by 10gen. 10gen is the company which develops MongoDB and offers support, training and consulting for MongoDB. The latest driver binaries can be downloaded at github from https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-csharp-driver/downloads

How to connect to the MongoDB server

First you need to add references to the dll’s which are provided by the MongoDB driver. Then you can establish the connection to the database. The next step is to connect to a collection. On the collection you can perform different CRUD operations.

Create a new document

First you need to create a BsonDocument. On the document you can add new key-value pairs by calling the add-method. As soon you finalized the new document you can store the document inside a collection with the save-method.

When you use the add-method like on the sample above, MongoDB automatically creates a string value for you. If you want to create an entry with an e.g. an ObjectId, you can use the following statement.

The driver offer many different options to combine conditions to a single query. Not only an AND exists. After building the query, you need to find the results. This can be done by calling a find with the query as parameter.

$results = $collection.find($query)

Update data inside a collection

To update an existing document you can start with querying for an existing document. The following command search for a document with the provided ObjectId. The Id on the document is unique. Therefore we can use findOne to get this document from the collection (because we expect only a single result). To update the fetched document we use the set-method. When everything is changed don’t forget to call save. The fact that we have a document with an existing ObjectId forces MongoDB to update the document and not to create a new one.

Delete documents from a collection

Deleting existing documents from a collection is easy. If you want to delete every document you can do this by calling removeAll. This will remove every document from the specified collection. Most of the time, you only want so delete a single document. To remove only specific data call the remove-method on the collection with a query. Every document which is returned by the query will be then be deleted.

Conclusion

With the C# driver it is easy to perform CRUD-Operations with MongoDB. Just have a look at the documentation of the driver if you need to perform some advanced queries. I really like how easy it is to connect to MongoDB via PowerShell.